Time to breathe: Montgomery County Obama organizer reflects on life-changing campaign

On Nov. 6, President Barack Obama was re-elected president of the United States, winning 50.4 percent of the popular vote.

But in Lower Merion/Narberth, Obama won 65.7 percent of the vote. Remarkably, the Obama effort here was captained by a first-time campaign staffer, Jediah Grobstein, who became inspired by Obama when he “witnessed” him speak about leadership in 2005 at a lecture series for Capitol Hill interns.

Grobstein, who grew up in Paoli attending Conestoga High School and Main Line Unitarian Church in Devon, interned with then-Congressman Curt Weldon. “The day Obama came, he got everyone so excited, we were cheering,” he said. “He enjoined us to work within a community you’re rooted in.”

Returning to college for his senior year, Grobstein’s mother fell ill with ovarian cancer. Fortunately, in May 2006 the family was able to gather in California then attend his twin sister’s graduation the following weekend in Maine. Still impelled by Obama’s speech, Jed began his summer training as a New York City Teaching Fellow. In July, his mother passed away.

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“I worked at 120 miles per hour: living in a new place, starting teaching in the Bronx — avoiding dealing with the mourning,” Grobstein said. He taught math in a public experimental “empowerment” high school. He joined the teachers’ union. At the end of the year, he was thoroughly fatigued.

On the weekend before Election Day 2008, Grobstein visited a friend working on Obama’s North Carolina campaign. There, he experienced “the coolest thing ever” as he helped with Get Out The Vote efforts.

“People brought a pie or a pot of beans to the office,” he recalled. “There was such a sense of enthusiasm and excitement. It was exhilarating!” He felt a “patriotism, a pride in national community” that he’d never sensed before.

One year later, Grobstein’s Bronx school was slated to be closed. He organized community objection to the decision. “I phone banked, canvassed, rallied, protesting that stakeholders were excluded from the evaluation process,” he said. His group joined with 18 other schools scheduled for closure. His union brought their case to court and won.

Grobstein resigned after four years of teaching.

“Getting to teach there was wonderful,” he said. “A lot of experiences were excruciating, and a lot were divinely inspired.” Even though he had simultaneously completed his M.Ed., he knew he didn’t want to be a teacher for the rest of his life.

He had “experienced the power of community, identity, and connection, as Obama had spoken of,” said Grobstein. That summer he volunteered for Sean Coffey’s campaign for N.Y. State Attorney General.

He returned to live with his father, who had moved to the Wayne section of Upper Merion Township. It was October 2010. As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars raged, Grobstein searched for committed service to “something bigger than myself.” He felt “strongly connected to the Commander in Chief,” and believed it “important that people who are conscientious, deliberate, and ethical be in positions where decisions that are very difficult and very dire are made,” he said. “I felt powerfully my responsibility to become a soldier for my country.” He applied to Officer Candidate School of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Grobstein trained for the rigorous physical fitness tests, then, another jolt came at Christmastime, when “Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. So I started taking care of him,” he said.

In May, he drove across the country for his five-year college reunion; at the end of June, his father died. He leaned on his grandmother (his father’s mother), aunt (who lives in Ardmore), and sister for support. A few weeks later, he was told that his Marine application was denied due to a high school sports injury that limited the range of motion of one of his shoulders. The following December, his grandmother, who had lived at The Quadrangle in Haverford, passed away.

“All of a sudden it became clear to me that my greater responsibility was to take care of my family. I’m the patriarch now.” He was 27. Again, he longed for something to “throw myself into completely.”

A well-timed email from www.barackobama.com titled “Are you interested in serving your country?” was all it took. Grobstein started as a full time unpaid Organizing Fellow in September 2011. “My commitment to re-electing the president was ultimately based upon his conscientious and ethical approach to solving problems, which I try to emulate,” said Gobstein. He was assigned to mobilize Upper Merion, where he lives.

After a brief training period, every week he was sent a list of 500 people to contact. Grobstein turned his late father’s bedroom into the Obama campaign office and set up the first phone bank. There were three people — including his aunt and himself.

He “jumped into the process.” Both his math and political science knowledge were valuable, as lists flowed to him from the campaign. Through his calls, he created increasingly defined data about voter support that he delivered back up the ladder.

The campaign innovated a “Neighborhood Team” model, in which volunteers contact their own neighbors as part of a “fully autonomous unit.” Grobstein found, trained, and guided highly committed individuals to volunteer as a “team leader” who oversaw core team members. They, in turn, ran phone banks and canvassed operations populated by scores of other local volunteers. Every contact was recorded; the data passed to Grobstein.

In March 2012, Grobstein was officially hired as an Obama campaign Field Organizer responsible for building teams in Upper Merion, Lower Merion, Narberth, Plymouth Meeting, Conshohocken, and Norristown. “Pouring out tons of energy” he created 13 teams, including nine in Lower Merion, each of which had “eight to 25 weekly volunteer participants all year long,” he said

Working 15-18 hour days, seven days a week, sleeping and eating regularly became a thing of the past. “You put up with it because of the big bucks payout,” he grinned wryly. In July, Grobstein opened an office in Ardmore that he shared with his campaign counterpart for northern Delaware County, Peter Rechter, while his area was mercifully narrowed to Lower Merion, home of 27,000 Democrats, or “turnout targets.”

Over the final four days of the campaign, all efforts shifted to GOTV, during which Grobstein reports having slept “a total of 7˝ hours.” He oversaw nearly 2,000 volunteers working 800 canvass shifts and 700 phone bank shifts from seven staging locations. Incredibly, “We exceeded our phone bank goals by almost 600 percent and our canvass goals by 130 percent,” he said.

Grobstein attributes this success to his spending “a long time developing my turf with really strong teams,” and “finding extraordinarily dynamic team leaders and volunteers who went far beyond what was asked of them.

“If you do your job right, you build these entities run by volunteers, and the field organizing role becomes less and less about me,” Grobstein said. “So on election day I was home sitting at my kitchen table for 16 hours. Team leaders called me, but I wasn’t in the field. It was a really strange feeling: I had practically nothing to do. So, I went onto the campaign’s online call tool and made some calls into Iowa and Colorado.”

After 9 p.m. he went back to Ardmore to join everyone watching the returns. “When they called Pennsylvania, we were pretty happy about that. I was excited but exhausted; I kept drifting in and out of consciousness. And then we won.” He slept through the president’s acceptance speech.

“When the president was re-elected, I felt a deep sense of pride in my fellow organizers, our team leaders and volunteers who had all worked so hard for this man,” said Grobstein.

These days, he stays busy with theAction.org, which supports Obama’s legislative policies. Grobstein wants to stay in electoral politics, and is interested in running for office to continue helping to build progressive communities.

“The Obama campaign allowed me to find the leadership and service I’d been looking for,” said Grobstein, “and I was able to do it right here where I grew up.”